Gun control: better killjoy than killed

I grew up around firearms in Texas, where a shooter ran amok on Tuesday: I know they're fun – and their deadly fascination

Armed police on the University of Texas at Austin campus in Austin, Texas on Tuesday 28 September 2010, after a gunman, Colton Tooley, opened fire with an AK-47 inside the library before shooting himself dead. Photograph: AP Photo/Tamir Kalifa
Tamir Kalifa/AP

On Tuesday morning, the University of Texas at Austin – home of the first ever school shooting in 1966, when Charles Whitman rained bullets from the tower for an hour and a half before shot dead by law enforcement – was subject to another student intent on wreaking havoc with an assault rifle. Not but a block away from this first-ever school shooting, Colton Tooley, a sophomore majoring in mathematics at the university, barged onto campus shooting rounds off an AK-47, before he entered the student library and shot himself to death on the 6th floor. The entire campus spent much of the day on lockdown as the police combed the campus to verify that there were no co-conspirators or bombs.

In a nation where armed gunman often run into crowded places and start firing, this incident could not capture much more than parts of a 24-hour news cycle, especially as no one but the shooter was killed, in what will likely turn out to be just a very dramatic suicide. For me – a Texan who had recently moved to New York City after living in Austin, Texas for nearly 15 years – the incident loomed large and provoked a great deal of stress. You see, I used to work across the street from the building where Tooley ended his life. For four years, I walked up the steps that, Tuesday, were littered with media and police dogs. I thought of that corner of the world as the epitome of peace, the home of the mundane. Most of my friends back home work at the university still, and were regularly sending updates out on Facebook. Those who were lucky were evacuated and sent home, but some were barricaded in buildings for hours, using their smart phones to let everyone know what was going on.

But it disturbed me more than just anxiety for my friends or feelings of violation at seeing this happen to a place I used to call home. It was also the realisation that even when a young man could grab an assault rifle and threaten the lives of so many the second he got the whim, there was no way that the state of Texas could conduct a meaningful debate on whether or not it's time to rethink our long-standing love of firearms.

I knew it couldn't happen; I'd grown up in Texas and have spent my entire life around guns. Most gun owners I know are responsible and never have accidents. Still, 32 years of my life around guns has brought me around to the conclusion that we need more gun control.

Coming to believe that we need more gun control laws was a long time coming for me. I not only grew up in gun-soaked Texas, but in the most gun-soaked part of Texas – rural west Texas. My father spent time in law enforcement, and my stepfather was a hunting aficionado with an enviable gun collection that included many pieces that probably aren't legal. I shot my first gun when I was 9 years old, and while I wasn't the kind of kid who had the stomach for hunting myself, it seemed like we were cleaning and preparing meat from something or other my stepfather had shot every week.

Even as an adult, guns were so ubiquitous that gun control made as much sense to me as banning beer that comes in a can or the word "y'all" – unpatriotic towards Texas at best, impossible at worst. One of my best friends back home is a great lover of guns and fast cars, and rarely did I go over to his house not to find some kind of firearm casually lying out in the open. My first boyfriend in college had a gun collection, not because he was some great gun nut, but because that's how we grew up.

Men own guns in Texas. It's what they do.

And let's face it; guns are fun. I loved going to my friend's ranch, throwing back some beers and then trying to shoot the cans off a fence. (I'm a bad shot.) It's easy to see why you'd want bigger, louder, more powerful guns. They're like video games, but real. Like fireworks, but more excitingly risky.

But then, in the late 90s, my college boyfriend's brother got shot while playing poker, an injury that shattered his femur and took him years to recover from. Gun defenders love to point out that criminals are the only ones who misuse guns in this way, as if you can separate criminals from non-criminals through an easy sorting process. In reality, many people don't become the kind of people who commit crimes until they, in the heat of passion and often fuelled by alcohol, pick up a gun and decide to take a fight that might have only ended in a bloody nose to the next level.

After that, my then boyfriend simply got rid of all his guns. And despite my long history of ease around guns, I instituted a rule that I live by to this day: I don't care if you personally want to create a weapons stockpile for yourself, but you will never bring a gun into my house. The one time a friend broke this rule, it only reaffirmed my commitment to it. He had stayed the night, and I was fiddling around on a shelf above my head looking for something, my hand rested on his gun. Until I brought it down to eye level, I couldn't be for sure that this is what he'd done. I woke him up, trembling, and asked him what could have happened if I'd accidentally mishandled it and shot myself. He, I knew, had accidentally fired it before, so he knew how likely such an event really was.

People like to play games in many different ways with the statistics, but at the end of the day, the simple reality we must face is this: if there isn't a gun on hand when someone wants to go off on his wife, some guy he thinks is cheating at cards, or an entire campus of people he has misplaced resentment for, then the amount of damage he can do is limited. The notion that gun control laws do nothing to slow the proliferation of illegal weapons is a joke to anyone who actually lives in a gun culture. The sea of legal weapons dealing makes it that much easier to hide illegal weapon sales in the mix, as was demonstrated in the aftermath of the Columbine shooting in Colorado. For another, the more legal guns there are in circulation, the more there are available for criminals to steal.

The arguments in favour of gun ownership are ridiculous. We don't need military grade assault rifles to shoot deer. As for home defence, to hear most gun nuts talk, you'd think that Americans live in war zones where we're constantly under assault. In reality, there are far more gun murders, accidents and suicides than there are criminals thwarted by guns. Even anecdotally, you can tell this – I've heard many firsthand accounts of gun violence and accidents from friends and acquaintances, but never once have I heard of someone actually fighting off a criminal with gunfire. And that's despite the fact that I grew up in a world where almost every household had a gun.

My good friend in Austin who has a small armoury was the one who pointed it out to me: the only real reason people love guns is that guns are fun. They make you feel big and powerful, which is why they're attractive to men to have a thing for seeming manly. Any other reasons for owning guns are so much self-rationalising.

I asked my friend what he would think if the government decided that enough was enough and started cracking down on guns. He thought about it for a moment and said, "That would probably be okay with me. I like guns, but I know that we'd all be better-off if they banned them."

Discussion thread shortcut

The author of this piece, Amanda Marcotte, has been participating in the conversation below as AmandaMarcotte. This is an excerpt selected by a Cif editor:

The notion that widespread gun ownership is a deterrent to crime is simply mistaken. It gives criminals too much and too little credit. Most burglars choose to break in when no one is home, because they don't want a confrontation, gun or no gun. The gun matters less than simply making it a hassle to get into your house. If burglary concerns you, you're far better off getting a good lock and a dog.